Gotham Diary:
Seen by the Moon
14 July 2014
By the time I caught sight of the moon, it was well above the horizon and no longer supersized by the atmosphere, but it was still as orange as Halloween, its leering face unusually pronounced. It floated, undimmed, behind a thin veil of mist, and I was reminded of Turandot. Then its upper edge slipped behind the absolute horizontal of a bank of dense clouds. Slowly but quite perceptibly, the moon passed out of sight, leaving a radiant fog that just as slowly dissipated.
I kept taking my glasses off and then putting them back on to read. I would look up at the moon, and take them off again. I was sitting in the dark on the balcony, reading an Inspector Wexford novel on the Kindle. I had had a pleasant dinner in the dusk, cleaned up, and then returned to sit in my easy chair and finish the Wexford. If I hadn’t seen the moon earlier, that may well have been because of another cloud bank. It’s possible that I didn’t look. A disturbing possibility. Seeing it when I did was a surprise.
I thought how long the moon has been looking down on us. Most of what human beings have done on and to the Earth is not visible from the moon (to other humans, that is, as we found out). The Great Wall of China, for example — you can’t, urban legend notwithstanding, see it from the moon. But I wonder if the urban blazes of nocturnal light can be seen.
I thought about calling Kathleen, but I remembered that the lakeside cottage where she is staying with friends, in Maine, faces south and west. I forgot that she was having dinner at another house, one with a view as east-southeast as ours. When we talked later, she told me that they had all gone out on the deck to watch the moon glide above the pines. It was so big, and so orange.
***
While Kathleen has been in Maine, I’ve been in England — she actually, I vicariously, on the page. I went straight from John Campbell’s Roy Jenkins to the latest Ian Rutledge mystery by Charles Todd. Now, it is true that “Charles Todd” is the nom de plume of a mother-son writing team based in the United States, but the Rutledge books are set in England in the aftermath of World War I, when motorcars required cranking. The illusion of time and place is very convincing, while at the same time the psychological atmosphere is somewhat less stuffy than that of books written back then — the effect, perhaps, of greater candor about the losses to war. When I was done with Proof of Guilt, I turned to the Wexford, Shake Hands Forever, which I’d been reading at bedtime for over a week. I was about halfway through, and too engaged in the story not to be tired of turning back the pages in search of the last one that I remembered reading. So it was time to hunker down and finish it. When it came to a very satisfactory conclusion, I opened the first of the Charles Todds, A Test of Wills, which I’d bought earlier in the day.
Also, on Saturday night, I watched the 1979 film adaptation of Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands, with Michael York and Simon MacCorkindale. Breezy and heavily abbreviated, it was not as riveting as the book, but it brought the book back to mind. I don’t recall ever having been so caught up in an adventure story.
On Friday, though, I was very much here, in the doubled New York of today and of Garry Winogrand’s photographs from the time of my childhood and youth. The New York of today was not unpleasant, but Winogrand’s certainly was, and all the more sharply so for presenting things pretty much as I saw them myself. It’s easy to succumb to the vision of lost glamour purveyed by Mad Men, and even Ray Soleil, at the Museum on Friday, was favorably impressed by how much better-dressed everyone was fifty years ago. But who cares about clothes when the expressions that people are wearing attest to such disagreeable states of mind? Weariness is everywhere, followed closely by impatience and worry. Faces in the later photographs look less imprisoned but more lost. Overall, the upsetting looniness of Diane Arbus is slightly dissolved, not focused in bizarre individuals but dulled and generalized throughout the population.
Winogrand (1928-1984) is known, and somewhat despised, as a shutterbug, a photographer who took jillions of careless pictures and then chose the happy — or, in this case, unhappy — accidents. Whether as photographer or art editor, however, he developed an aesthetic sensibility strong enough to be successfully assumed by curators of the many rolls of film that remained undeveloped at the time of his death (from cancer). The images gathered for the exhibition currently at the Museum (as well as those that appear, additionally, in the catalogue) hang together as a portrait, in traces, of a wretchedly disappointed land. You would not want to visit it. I am glad to have outlived it. When I think of the schlubby herds of North Faced tourists shuffling up and down Fifth Avenue in Midtown, I bear in mind that, if they look a little vacant, they are at least buoyed up by companions with whom they’re laughing or quarreling. There is no companionship in Garry Winogrand. There is only defensive alliance.
This was a world in which it was common knowledge that women could never be true friends, because women would inevitably betray friendship in pursuit of a man. This was a world in which only men knew how to think. This was a world in which women looked hard, or soiled, or both. Men looked wary or bored. Yes, men and women were “better-dressed,” with plenty of coats and ties and fur collars, but they were also unwillingly dressed. Their clothes didn’t quite fit, didn’t suit. Itchy pointlessness was pervasive.
This was clearly a society that would be as mortally undercut by the Internet and smartphones as Native Americans were by the introduction of European diseases. I certainly needed a stiff drink at the Balcony Lounge.
Daily Blague news update: Selfy.